In this ambitious book, Michael Peletz sets out to explore how and under what conditions "gender pluralism" may develop and thrive in a society or nation-state. Peletz uses "pluralism" to refer to instances in which certain types of diversity are granted legitimacy. By "gender pluralism" he refers in particular to instances in which forms and degrees of legitimacy are granted to culturally recognized inclinations, behaviors, roles, relationships, and expressive forms associated with concepts that go beyond a dualistic opposition of maleness and femaleness to include hermaphrodism, androgyny, and other transgender possibilities. Peletz locates his study in the broad coordinates of Southeast Asian geography and history. In the course of his analysis, he draws on a wide array of cases from across the region and across the centuries. He establishes a baseline in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the first half of the early modern period--to identify dimensions of gender pluralism that existed in the region before European colonial influences became a significant factor. He identifies a series of conditions supportive of the forms of gender pluralism thereafter discussed in the book. These include the prevalence of bilateral kinship systems that do not favor the male or the female line; dualistic cosmologies with complementary female and male elements; roles for women in agricultural, life cycle, and healing rituals; women''s participation in politics and trade; tolerance of premarital sex; initiation of divorce by either party; and a relatively high degree of autonomy and agency afforded to women.

Peletz posits that the transgender themes in the hegemonic forms of state ritual and courtly practice built on and afforded legitimacy to behavior in the wider society. He explores how polymorphic patterns of gender in the region were melded with and reinforced by Southeast Asian forms of cosmology and statescraft, strongly inflected by the Saivite and Tantric traditions of South Asia over the course of two millennia. Importantly, he argues that transgender ritual practices were not transgressive exceptions to societal conventions, but rather were consistent with gender pluralism in society at large. Gender pluralism in this era included legitimate sexual relations between same-sex partners who were differentiated genderwise by markers such as dress, occupation, and ritual roles. Ritual practitioners, for example, included anatomical males who performed in women''s dress and married other anatomical males. Such specialists had a place in royal courts as well as in the villages and countryside. The importance of legitimation by hegemonic structures and ideologies is a point developed carefully across historical eras. In his chapter on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Peletz introduces accounts of two populations in Borneo--the Iban and the Ngaju Dayak--for whom documentation is lacking until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

With appropriate caveats, he reviews the evidence concerning transgendered ritual practitioners in these two stateless societies and compares them to the well-known bissu, transgendered ritual specialists who have played a well186 Jane Monnig Atkinson documented role in the ritual and political life of the Bugis of South Sulawesi for centuries. As keepers of the lontar-palm manuscripts that contain the royal geneaologies, chronicles, and charters, bissu were closely affiliated with political authority. Peletz argues that the bissu complex has lent legitimacy to calabai and calalai, anatomical males and females in Bugis society who are not ritual specialists, but do have sex with same-sex partners. This three-way comparison of Iban, Ngaju Dayak, and Bugis is pivotal for Peletz''s argument that gender pluralism is affected by the relationships of a social group to the structures of class and power within the wider polity. Peletz returns to these cases in the second half of his book, where he makes the case that the decline of transgender ritual practice among the Iban and the Ngaju Dayak is connected to the increasing marginalization of these populations within the nation-state, domination by more economically and politically powerful neighboring populations, and the growing influence of hegemonic world religions. And in the case of the Iban, urban migration and female prostitution, he argues, have seriously eroded women''s standing as well. By contrast, the Bugis, who number three and a half million in South Sulawesi alone, have sustained a higher degree of gender pluralism and a stronger social position for women, thanks to their economic clout, political influence, and reputation as staunch Muslims. Peletz is sensitive to the risk of imposing an overly deterministic and unilinear model on historical transformations.

In the Bugis case, for example, he highlights the fluctuations within the last six decades, a period which saw both persecution of bissu in the early years of the Indonesian Republic and a re-florescence of bissu in the post-Sukarno era. The second half of the early modern period--the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--was a time of profound economic, political, and creedal transformations in Southeast Asia, with the intensification of trans-regional commerce, political centralization fueled by increased wealth and competition, and the rise of religious orthodoxies (i.e., Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim). With these changes came dislocations and delegitimization of older cosmological and sociopolitical forms. Peletz traces the displacement of transgendered and female ritual practitioners in this era, as well as factors contributing to a decline in women''s cultural, political, and economic standing. Peletz draws on Barbara Andaya''s important work concerning the retrenchment of women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including her study of how "temporary marriage," once a respectable form of alliance between elite families and foreign traders in which the female partners exercised a high degree of agency, devolved into stigmatized forms of concubinage and prostitution as elites abandoned the practice, and foreign men entered into relationships with women of lower classes who could bring only sex and domestic services, not powerful political and trade alliances, to their unions.1 In addressing the effects of European colonialism on gender pluralism, Peletz engages Stoler''s important work on gender, race, and class, pointing out its failure to 1 Barbara W.

Andaya, "From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early Modern Southeast Asia," Journal of Women''s History 9,4 (1998): 11-34. Gender Pluralism 187 account for the significance of homosexuality in these intertwining discourses.2 To his credit, Peletz freely acknowledges the same omission in his previous books on Malaysia. He argues that, by going beyond the archival records, it is possible to find rich documentation regarding sexual diversity in the writings of travelers, missionaries, ethnographers, and novelists, as well as in artistic work of this period. These sources document European reactions to sexual diversity in local cultures and illuminate the development of stereotypes concerning the "feminized and degenerate East"; racialized accounts of societal evolution and human sexuality; policies that promoted female concubinage and prostitution as a deterrent to interracial homosexual relations between colonial (European) workers and local men; and transformations in the labor markets, including the sex trade, with far-reaching consequences for the health and livelihoods of women and men. The overarching point of Peletz''s analysis regarding this transformation of acceptable behavior is that transgendered and female ritual participants once played a significant role in the symbolic, ritual, and political structures of precolonial Southeast Asian states. As such, they gave legitimacy to a range of transgender behaviors that existed within the tolerances of Southeast Asian kinship, family, and social systems as long as that activity did not violate the heterogender framework of those systems. Through much of the region, the ties between transgender ritual practice and political authority have been severed in recent centuries.

What is more, world religions, with new and reformed orthodoxies, have displaced older cosmological frameworks and often stigmatized their transgender elements. Female participation, let alone prominence, in rituals of statehood has been similarly displaced. Although popular tolerance continues through most of the region for same-sex sexual relations, such relations are less likely to be validated through state ideologies and institutions. In the second half of the book, Peletz explores the changing dynamics of Southeast Asian gender pluralism as they are playing out in the postcolonial era. Prominent in this section are in-depth analyses of Burma and Malaysia in the contemporary era. (The Burmese government, since the 1962 coup, has resisted modernity and participation in the global economy, in contrast to Malaysia, whose leadership has sought to combine<.